Modernism diasporas can be found anywhere in the world. But in few countries, there is such a seamless transition from traditional to modernist architecture like in Vietnam.
Vietnam was one of the post-colonial countries that embraced modernism as the new architecture to continue their ancient cultural background. Yet unlike other post-colonial states in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese architects didn’t use ornamentation or structural imitations to project identity. Works of architects like Lê Văn Lắm (Architecte Diplômé Par Le Gouvernement, Urbaniste with a 1963 conference on The Big Problems of Paris’s Urbanism) or Ngô Viết Thụ (Grand Prix de Rome 1955) were staying true to the modernist virtues. Their buildings don’t try to make a revival of the distant traditional architecture. What they used was abstractions, and most importantly, the micro-climatic tactics that tropicalized modernism to fit in the climatic context of Vietnam. These architects, in fact, the first generation of Vietnamese architects, have investigated the new functions and aesthetics of industrial materials to come up with a vocabulary of modernist elements that were later received and embedded into the architectural culture of Vietnam.
To understand this idea of identity to which Vietnamese architects adhere, it’s worth looking at how Vietnamese modernist architecture was influenced by Vietnamese traditional architecture and the decisions made by architects back then. A typology that shows such an influence is the villa.
This design from the collection of Popular House Constructions from the Department of Urban Construction and Design in 1957 is a good reference to provide an overview of the state of vernacular housing after the First Indochina War that ended in 1954....
